Stephanie Lovinsky-Desir
Columbia University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a long-term lung disease that blocks airflow, causes about 6% of deaths worldwide and may be preventable. Its roots often lie in childhood.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Physiology
- Topics
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease
dysanapsis
airway-lung mismatch
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Feb 2031
What they work on
- Establish how dysanapsis, a mismatch between airway size and lung size, measured early in life relates to lung function trajectories through childhood and to dysanapsis at late adolescence, using 8 birth cohorts, spirometry and lung MRI.
- Determine whether childhood obesity and viral respiratory infections contribute to functional dysanapsis measured by breathing tests and to distinct structural subtypes of dysanapsis seen on lung imaging.
- Examine whether community-level factors, including early-life air pollution exposure and neighborhood social conditions, are associated with functional dysanapsis in diverse cohorts of children.
- Compare imaging-based and spirometry-based measures of dysanapsis to judge how useful each is for identifying children at risk.
More about the research
The research team has found that dysanapsis, a mismatch where the airways are too narrow for the size of the lungs, is common in older adults. It predicts COPD risk more strongly than tobacco smoke or other known risk factors, and genetics does not fully explain it. Dysanapsis begins early in life and takes different structural forms, but what causes it is poorly understood. Finding the early-life factors that can be changed could help protect children from COPD later.
Why it matters
COPD kills millions, and dysanapsis, a mismatch between airway and lung size that starts in childhood, predicts it more strongly than smoking. Identifying early-life causes that can be changed, such as obesity, viral infections, air pollution and neighborhood conditions, could guide targeted prevention for high-risk groups of children. This could lower their chance of developing COPD as adults.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Sarah Miller
Medical University of South Carolina, SC·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether RESP-FIT, a home program of respiratory muscle strength training with a portable device and mobile health support, reduces shortness of breath in rural adults with COPD, using a randomized controlled trial against enhanced usual care.
Andres Cardenas
Stanford University, CA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Test whether a 12-month in-home HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filter intervention slows epigenetic and proteomic aging clocks in the nasal lining and blood of older former smokers with eosinophilic COPD, using samples from a randomized sham-controlled trial.
Samir Kelada
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC·Genetics
Determine whether Angpt1 or Rspo2 is the causal gene at a mouse chromosome 15 locus controlling ozone-induced airway injury, using knockdown, knockout and rescue experiments, and test the nearby human variant rs10086579 in three human cohorts.
The school
Columbia University: 89 labs on PI Pages, $1.4B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.
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